As I understand it, the letters in LGBTQ stand for:
L = Lesbian (women who are sexually attracted to other women)
G = Gay (people who are sexually attracted to other people of the same sex)
B = Bisexual (people who are sexually attracted to both genders)
T = Transgender (people who were born either male or female but mentally identify as the opposite sex)
Q = Queer (?)
I had always been told that queer was a derogatory term for homosexuals. If it is no longer considered an insult and instead has been claimed by the community it was originally insulting (sort of like the use of the N word being used by African Americans), what does the designation now refer to in the acronym? I’ve recently seen in a thread that it may have referred to genderqueer but I am unclear on what that means.
Please let me be clear, I am in no way trying to disrespect anyone or offend in any way. I am seriously confused and am trying to learn. I am at work right now and can’t really google this as our Inet usage is heavily filtered, with the SDMB being one of the few sites that comes through all the time.
I am also wondering how the whole non-binary gender thing works and am genuinely confused? I realize I am behind the times and am trying to not be. If this has all been covered before, which I am sure it has been, could someone provide links to the threads or suggest successful terms to search for so I can find them myself. Trying to search for “gender” or “LGBTQ” on these boards provides way too many hits to be useful for what I am trying to learn.
As I understand it, “queer” is taken as an umbrella term that encompasses all forms of non-mainstream sexuality or sexual identity. It would apply to all four of the previous letters of the acronym, as well as to asexual people (who aren’t attracted to either gender), agendered people (who identify as neither gender), people who identify as both genders, people who identify as one singular thing that doesn’t correspond to either gender, physically intersex people, and all sorts of other possible situations.
I understood the Q to stand for ‘Questioning’ - i.e. individuals who are uncertain of their own orientation, and/or whether it fits in any other category.
Queer has been at least partially reclaimed by the community. As I understand it, it doesn’t mean anything necessarily specific, just not the standard either in gender presentation or sexual preference.
When you’re as focused on inclusivity as the non-heterosexual community is, things can get pretty long pretty quickly. LGBTQ is probably the shortest acronym you see nowadays. I see LGBTQQIA, LGBTQQIAA, LGBTQQIAAP, and LGBTQQIAA2P pretty frequently. In all these cases, the two Qs stand for Queer and Questioning.
I just wish they had chosen a different order for the letters. LGBT is all well and good, but an IGBT is something very different. I still find it hard to switch contexts. Adding the Q helps however.
I titled my coming-out book The Story of Q. As a person who identifies genderqueer, I feel like I am being included in the LGBTQ rainbow now that the “Q” is included.
I don’t think it means “queer” or “genderqueer” or “questioning” so much as it means “etcetera”. Or at least functions as an “etcetera”. I’ll take it. It’s genuinely nice to have some recognition and welcome from a community / activist contingent in society where I have not always felt like I belonged and was considered a valid participant.
I’ll be honest in that I do not understand gender beyond male and female. I will gladly call someone whatever they want to be called and I honestly don’t care insomuch as it has absolutely no bearing in how I interact with that person. But, I honestly do not understand the concept. I’m trying to understand but am having a really hard time wrapping my head around it.
Maybe I’ll just read wiki articles on it when I get home and see if it starts to make sense to me.
If you must needlessly ‘correct’ people, at least add some value to your post by noting that the word for abbreviations made out of initial letters that are not pronounced as words is initialism.
I don’t consider male and female to be genders at all.
They are sexes. They aren’t the only ones but the overwhelming majority of people fall into those two categories in a clean and specific fashion. The handful of remainders are intersex. We’re talking biology here. Physiological plumbing. Male and female. That’s sex, not gender.
Gender starts out as a set of generalizations about the sexes. If you happen to be one of the people who simply DON’T believe any differences between the two biological sexes exist other than the biological-plumbing diffs, you are essentially a person who considers gender to NOT EXIST (at least for you; you may still acknowledge that it exists for some other people, in their heads, as notions). For everyone else, gender is a wide swath of notions about personality and behavior, priorities and nuances and tendencies. Gender also has tended to include different obligations, imperatives about how a person “should” be, different roles, avocations, what a person DOES in society – in our own western society we’ve uprooted a lot of the coercively obligatory differences in that area but if you look outside our society OR look backwards in time, there it is. Gender is “man” versus “woman”, or “femininity” versus “masculinity”, or “girl” versus “boy”. That’s gender, as opposed to sex.
Gender has tended to be somewhat intermingled and intertwined with sexual orientation – again, not without some modern-day serious efforts to DIS-entangle them (for instance we are less likely than folks in the 1970s to believe that all lesbian women are masculine) but remaining assumptions still color both our attitudes about sexual orientation and our attitudes about gender. (for instance a male person who exhibits a lot of socially masculine personality and behavoral traits may be perceived as heterosexual regardless of that person’s actual sexual orientation).
It’s very confusing. For starters, L, G, and B are sexual orientations, while T is not. Ts can be any genrder and any sexual orientation. But we should also note that B (Bi) has a built-in assumption that there are only 2 genders. And, as noted, Q can be just about anything.
Speaking metaphorically, Nature played a cruel trick on our species. She made us such that we want to categorize everything into neat boxes, but she keeps throwing shit at us that doesn’t fit neatly into boxes.
Yep. Has nothing to do with it. Except that it does: external perception of M2F or F2M trans people tended to be “that person’s homosexual”. WHY? Because society did not, for a long time, have a concept of transgender people. It knew about gay and lesbian people. There was (and to some extent still is) a stereotype that gay males are more like (straight) women than other men are, or even more like (straight) women than they’re like other men, and similarly for lesbians that they resemble (straight) men more than other women do / more than they themselves resemble other women. You probably aren’t unfamiliar with that stereotype.
SO… suppose you’re trans. The reaction of surrounding to society to you has often been to label you and treat you as gay. Assume that there is, as of yet, no such thing as a transgender support group or transgender activist group you can go join. Where do you go? Maybe, probably, to the gay rights groups. Closest approximation.
Another excellent point. A whole lot of the younger people these days appear to be identifying as pansexual instead of bisexual for precisely that reason.
For the third time, yep, and it’s worse even than that: even if you narrow it down to “genderqueer” it still prety much “etcetera” territory. We got more subtypes than radio stations have genres, right here in genderqueersville.
I disagree that Pansexual is immediately analogous to Bisexual. Bisexual is attraction first to the physical, but which is not limited to Male or Female. Pansexual is attraction first to the overall personality, with physical attraction driven not by the body, but by the mental/spiritual/emotional connection.